A broad spectrum of industries including healthcare, education, manufacturing, transportation, banking, and government depend on their networks to deliver fast, reliable access to information at relatively low cost. For example, data center network architectures are challenged to cost effectively meet scale, performance and availability requirements. A data center network can be represented as a hierarchical structure consisting of a core layer, an aggregation (or distribution) layer, and an edge layer (also known as access layer) layers. The access layer is a mesh of network switches, linked to other switches in the aggregation layer, which in turn is linked to the core. The lattice of switches provides multiple paths for network traffic, such that if one link or switch goes down, traffic can continue to flow using an alternate path. The performance and extensibility of these devices (i.e., the multi-layer switches) is a critical enabler of large-scale, highly-available, high-performance data center networks. However, the cost of the multi-layer switches is often a hindrance to scaling and maximizing performance. In addition, the modular nature of the switches often represents a lock-in to a specific device vendor, further reducing the data center's availability. Cloud computing environments in particular have unique needs for scale and performance which exceed traditional enterprise-level requirement. Thus, there is a need to provide network architectures (e.g., data center networks, campus Ethernet networks, and cloud computing networks) that cost effectively meet scale, performance, and availability requirements.